Sign in

“The Butler” and Philip Roth

August 23, 2013

Of course, most of “The Butler”—the director Lee Daniels’s story of the White House service-staff member Cecil Gaines (liberally reimagined from the life story of Ernest Allen)—takes place in Washington, D.C., where Gaines, like Allen, lived and worked. But the capital isn’t just the movie’s setting; it is, in effect, its subject. It’s a fact worth noting as we near the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington (the full official title of that epochal event is the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom), because “The Butler” is a stirring yet cautionary tribute to federal power—as well as the crucial role played by the mass media in influencing it.

The movie starts in Washington, where the elderly Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker) is on duty outside a concert where Schumann’s Piano Concerto is being played; he hears it but doesn’t see it, and, rather, he remembers—and what first comes to Cecil’s mind is a vision of two black men hanging from a tree, with the American flag waving behind them. From the start, Daniels links the traumas of personal and national history, of the country’s stain and an individual’s agony.

Whether it’s the physical assault and arrest of civil-rights protesters or the consequences of military service in the Vietnam War, the possibility of education or the prospect of employment, the struggle to get by on a low income when white colleagues enjoy more and to endure the frustration of a dead-end job when white colleagues can expect promotion—and, ultimately, the very matter of selfhood, of living in wider American society with the same freedom of self-expression and self-recognition that one bears in private circles—all are tethered, in “The Butler,” to the decisions of individuals in the Federal government, and, ultimately, with the President. The minutiae of daily life and the haunting psychic recesses are all inseparable from the exercise of government power—and “The Butler” has the remarkable effect of making that power appear visible, as if the very air we breathe were suddenly given a tint.

I’m reminded of James Baldwin’s famous exchange with Norman Mailer on the subject of power, in which Mailer expressed curiosity about it and Baldwin, as paraphrased by Matthew Clair, responded that, as a black man, “he understood how power worked, for if he didn’t, he would be dead.” One of the movie’s great inspirations, as scripted by Danny Strong, is the display of what Cecil calls the “two faces”: the way that a black person must show himself publicly among whites, and the way that he can be among other blacks in private. Cecil’s uninhibited manner at home with his wife, Gloria (whom Oprah Winfrey incarnates with a bracingly untheatrical, discursive spontaneity), and among his friends and his black colleagues at the White House, is altogether different from the near-robotic repression of his service demeanor. (The theme also emerges in the 1950 film “The Jackie Robinson Story,” with its contrast between Robinson’s relaxed way with fellow Negro-League players and his stern self-control in the National League.)

Of course, everyone has at least two faces (the very nature of working life is self-filtering; the director Samuel Fuller even called his autobiography “My Third Face,” with regard to the one that nobody else can see), but the breadth of the gap between Cecil Gaines’s faces—and the element of fear that marks their separation—is itself a scar of injustice, and even the ultimate injustice, one that remains even when the law has significantly (though utterly incompletely) addressed institutional racism, a trauma that endures, and that belongs as much to culture and to history as to law.

That’s why the reach of “The Butler” goes beyond the story of Cecil Gaines—and beyond the story of his connection with American Presidents—into the wider realms of literature. The movie brings to mind Swede Levov, the protagonist of Philip Roth’s novel “American Pastoral,” with its long and lovingly detailed disquisition on the production of gloves, which is also a majestic paean to the intricacy of ordinary work, to the amount of practical knowledge, perception, intuition, sensibility, intelligence, and sympathy that go into the successful undertaking of any craft, any profession. It’s a passage of profound respect for ordinary work that’s ordinarily overlooked, taken for granted, or even looked down upon. “The Butler” is a song of workingman’s grandeur that, unlike Roth’s, is delivered in the voice of the workingman himself, and takes the workingman’s point of view throughout (Levov isn’t the laborer but the factory owner). One notable detail concerns the young Cecil’s relationship with his father, who teaches him the fine points of picking cotton. It’s not his cotton—it’s the white plantation owner’s—but his father does his job with the respect for craft that yields a measure of self-respect. (Moments thereafter, Cecil’s mother is raped, and his father murdered, by the plantation’s young white master, a crime committed with impunity that sets in motion the events leading to Cecil’s career in domestic service.)

There’s another element of Roth’s work that the movie brings to mind. One of the key aspects of “The Butler” is the relationship between Cecil and his elder son, Louis, who is ashamed of his father’s self-effacing service and who—much to Cecil’s dismay—becomes a political activist. First, Louis takes part in civil-rights demonstrations and sit-ins in the early sixties, then becomes a Freedom Rider, and, eventually, a member of the Black Panthers. The clashes between the hard-working, self-sacrificing father whose unremitting and meticulous labor feeds his family and the intellectual son who, brought up with a modicum of comfort and a wealth of love, protection, and support, becomes a free-thinker and radical who repudiates his parents’ middle-class values—well, this is a central theme in Roth’s work. Louis Gaines (David Oyelowo) takes his place alongside Alexander Portnoy and Nathan Zuckerman—and, especially, Merry Levov, the Swede’s daughter, who commits revolutionary violence. And, once again, it’s “American Pastoral” that looks at the child through the eyes of the father, unlike the Zuckerman novels and “Portnoy’s Complaint.” Portnoy’s father, the worn-down insurance salesman who—as a Jew—is kept in subordinate roles in the company and denied promotions but soldiers on faithfully, and Zuckerman’s father, who takes the side of local Jewish advocates who oppose—in fear of anti-Semitic reprisals from the country at large—Nathan the writer’s provocative fiction, are both versions of Cecil Gaines, but with a difference: the difference between the milder afflictions of American anti-Semitism and the horrors of Jim Crow and its legacy.

Roth insisted, in the documentary “Philip Roth: Unmasked,” that he should be considered not a Jewish writer but an American one. “The Butler” is very much an American movie—its subject is more than the inextricable connection between the individual and the nation; it’s the nation itself and its own struggle to unify its faces, the face of stated ideals and the face of practice. In the celebration of craft, Daniels also presents himself as a craftsman. His finest inspirations are confined to fleeting but potent touches, such as the red blood on the white frosting of the cake that Cecil has broken a window to eat; the pan shot up Jackie Kennedy’s blood-spattered leg after her husband’s assassination; Cecil’s handshake with his black supervisor at the White House; and Gloria’s look into the camera at the moment of her death. In the movie’s own vision of the crucial role of media as the nation’s moral mirror, the Hollywood filmmaker’s craft is itself a matter of politics.

Yet there’s one aspect of Daniels’s filmmaking that jolted me nearly from my seat, and it’s a gesture of a forthright assertion. Throughout the film, Daniels represents—he gets actors to play Presidents and other historical figures (John Cusack’s awkward, resentful Nixon is a brilliant turn)—but, when Louis heads to Memphis for a rally early in April, 1968, there’s a scene in a motel room in which Martin Luther King, Jr., asking Louis about his father, delivers a spontaneous sermon on the secretly “subversive” role played by black service employees in the struggle for civil rights. The surprise is that Dr. King (played by Nelsan Ellis) is on-screen, sitting and talking, like any other character in the film. I was reminded of an Eastwood film, “J. Edgar,” a fact-based drama filled with impersonations of historical figures—with the exception of three, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Dr. King, who appear only as voices or silhouetted figures. It’s as if, in Eastwood’s vision of the Constitution as secular scripture and rights as divine principles, he had, in his mind, hit a taboo on the depiction of the prophets.

Dr. King may have been among the greatest of men, but in “The Butler” he is also (to cite the title of Michael Roemer’s crucial 1964 drama) nothing but a man. There’s no difference in kind between Cecil Gaines and John F. Kennedy, or between either and Dr. King; there are differences in experience and achievement, in particular skills and in character—but not in intrinsic worth or dignity, not in the potential to make history, especially since, in this movie, history is more than a succession of public events, it’s individual experience given a full measure of respect.

P.S. There’s a terrific scene involving a White House concert, during the Kennedy Administration, by the cellist Pablo Casals of the Mendelssohn D-minor Trio, and a quick, sharp political discussion that follows. That concert actually happened: the trio also included the violinist Alexander Schneider and the pianist Mieczyslaw Horszowski, and the concert was recorded.